"Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. 'Lead us not into temptation.'" Joseph Campbell
Kanye is one of the few mainstream musicians who still treat their works as passionate art forms, producing beautiful and inspiring couture music and offering audible filet mignons as an alternative to the pop-tunes’ Big Macs. (Chris Leal)
Last year I was inappropriately offended that Kanye West's album was shut out from the Grammies--inappropriate because the album falls under 2012 not 2011.
But I can now refresh my piss-a-tude because while he's received a lot of nominations, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy wasn't nominated for record or album of the year. While Adèle deserves all the nominations she got (record, album, song etc.) , the Bruno Mars nomination irks me. I bought his album, it's good, it's fun, he's talented... but for the love! Twisted Fantasy is epic, it's cutting edge, it's lush, and the lyrics are clever and deeply personal.
Here are some lyrics from Bruno Mars' "Grenade" (nom for record and song of the year)
Mad woman, bad woman
That's just what you are
Yeah, you smile in my face Then rip the brakes out my car
Did he go to the Weird Al School of Love Song Writing?
Oh, why did you disconnect the brakes in my car?
That kind of thing is hard to ignore
Got a funny feeling you don't love me anymore (Weird Al, You Don't Love Me Anymore)
There's a cut off age for seriously writing those kind of lyrics.
Here's one of my fave Dark Twisted songs, "Power" which seems to be most reflective upon all the shit he got himself into, culminating in Taylorgate.
Lost in translation with a whole fuckin' nation
They say I was the abomination of Obama's nation
He's behaving himself and saying he thinks he wasn't nominated for record and album because he released two albums in the same year (the second being with Jay Z, and was also nominated for best rap album.) But I'm not the only one who sees a snubitude. Most critics think it's due, not to his antics, but a lingering lack of appreciation for hiphop among the committee peeps. Bruno Mars' inclusion in best record and album does make this seem likely, since it's très Motown. I can imagine an older committee member saying: "Now this is what those young folks should be singing! Not that gol dang rap garbage. Why in my day..."
Here's the gorgeous song he was nominated for, including Rihanna, Fergie, woah woahs by Alicia Keyes, and several others including Elton John. "All of the Lights" which I suspect is also about his journey through music industry land ("Tell her she take me back, I'll be more supportive.")
Fast cars, shooting stars All of the lights, all of the lights Until it's Vegas everywhere we are
In other news... I hope Nicki Minaj wins for Best New Artist.
She was universally acknowledged to have shredded her fellow big boys on the song "Monster" (when you can get everyone in youtubeland to agree on something, that's a small miracle), won best hip hop album at the AMAs, and has been heralded as the next big thing in rap by the likes of Kanye and Rick Ross. But she won't win. :-(
And if I'm fake I ain't notice cause my money ain't
PS - Radiohead got nominated in the Alternative section. Has Alternative just become a genre, rather than a recognition of off-the-beaten-track artists?
In re. my posting about the Nicki Minaj video--that her backup dancers were surprisingly perhaps less conventionally hot than the usual backup dancers in pop videos, and less skinny--
a male heterosexual (I think!) friend said he usually finds backup dancers of female pop singers are generally not supa hot, presumably because it's part of the "gimmick." The entourage can't be prettier than the star.
This is a good point actually, which must work in inverse for the boys. I'm now about to launch into some theorizing. If it doesn't interest you, just scroll to the pictures! :-D
The attractiveness of the female backup dancers add to the virility of a male star. He doesn't want the men watching him to think, at least subconsciously: What's wrong with him, can't he get hotter chicks than this? The members of Metallica have commented that they could tell when their fan base expanded--they were "making it--because more women were turning up at their concerts, and the women in their showers after the concert (where they liked to have their groupies placed) were more attractive.
And it will tell you the status of the newest member of the band, bassist Jason Newsted, that they made sure he got the "least pretty" groupie. Hey... no one's consciously mating here, but that doesn't mean your genes ever stop trying to find the best waist to hip ratio, or symmetrical features, or maybe just the features that you believe confer you power amongst the males in your social group. Who knows.
So. The women in men's videos have to be hot so that male fans will enjoy the videos, and so that male fans will perceive the pop singer to be virile, and in some cases to bolster the ego of the pop singer since artists can be a very insecure bunch, in a very superficial and fickle head-case industry.
Similarly the status of a female pop star might depend upon her being the most attractive woman in "the room" (the video, the stage). In this fickle and superficial business, there is no one more subjected to the superficiality than a female pop star. Given how many people will be watching her weight and criticizing and commenting on her appearance--everyone from her management to the media to strangers on the net--it's in her best interest to not be outshone by her dancers. She can't have people thinking "what a cow" every time her video comes on.
But I don't know that dancers need to be picked out specifically for their plainness--you certainly don't want "ugly" dancers, cause that's distracting. The pop star will not be judged by male or female fans by her dancers' looks, the way a male pop singer will be--her dancers actually need to be nondescript. So if there is a higher incidence of "less attractive" backup dancers in female singers' videos (and that's hard to judge, but let's assume), then it's probably not because they're chosen for this quality (if you can call it that) but because the "really hot" women are not chosen.
If I'm casting for a video or a tour, I now have the luxury to look for dance skill, for body types that suit a particular show style, without also having to vet for hotness. If I think someone is "too pretty" that's probably easier to filter out than it is to choose for. It's also controllable through makeup. Conclusion: If backup dancers is women's videos are less pretty, it's because the attractiveness standard is lower than for men's videos.
But the one bar that's rarely lowered is that of body weight/size. And yet here, I think it's been lowered.
I still maintain that the women in Minaj's dance team are a little on the heavier side than usual; their choreography in this video is a lot less sexualized than we usually see; and it's possibly less sexualized over all, in her concerts. The "weight" factor could be imagined on my part; or it could be coincidental; or it could be because she has a crappy person casting her dancers; or it could be because of an intense insecurity on Minaj's part; or it could be an interesting "casting" choice based on Minaj's female-centered focus, which you can see throughout her work.
I also think Minaj's artistic sensibility in her videos and shows in party hiphop, and part theatrical like Gaga and Katy Perry. And as I'll show in the photos below, theatrical backup dancers are not definitely not chosen based on a narrow idea of beauty or body type. I don't think she's made a full crossover to the theatrical, but instead draws inspiration from it, and infuses it into her rap and hiphop sensibilities, and that's what causes the interesting cognitive dissonance in this video: the ice motorcycle, the boy eye candy, the not-really-sexy backup chicks. It has hiphop video elements, with a Katy Perry patina.
A final note: I don't inherently have a problem with women dancers being sexy or sexualized. It's just pretty ubiquitous at this point... it'll be a nice change when the pendulum swings.
Without more ado...
The Thin and Sexualized
Beyoncé
Rihanna & Friends' bottoms
Rihanna
Brit's infamous comeback
Dancers thinner than her that day
Britney Spears
Old Britney (same as the new, as were her dancers)
Janet Jackson
Christina Aguilera's attempt at an S&M comeback
Ciara (weird jeans, but you can see the dancer's six packs)
A backup dance group that's worked for women as well as men
Exceptions
These days Aguilera's doing a burleque thing (maybe because she's a little weightier herself?) So some of her dancers look a curvier to me.
Not in the below photo, though.
Katy Perry belongs to the Theatrical Set
There's sexy schoolgirl here, but no denying the dancer on the right has Thighs
Gaga's dancers are all skinny, but they look like ballet dancers to me--flat all over. And definitely not sexualized in the traditional sense. It's theatah dahling!
And of course, the original Queen of Pop Theatre. Her backup crew has always been more than just eye candy.
Two Interesting Asides
You can really see the change in aesthetic when you come across 90s videos. I don't think the bondage aesthetic is necessarily bad for women, I've just had my fill.
Check out these two images of Mariah and Janet! There's even a dance number with the fully uniformed unsexy female cinema employees.
I do not know what to make of Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls)" video. It's definitely... what's the African equivalent of Orientalist? The backup dancer army women aren't stick thin but... their battle gear of choice, for facing down a menacing group of riot geared men, is Appolonia's outfit from Purple Rain.
Including the cape.
They crawl in the sand like kittehs.
Perform menacing aerobics!
So I don't know if this video is another example of an exception to the cliché Sex Backup Dancer look. But it's definitely telling me...
I just watched Nicki Minaj's last video "Super Bass" and I noticed something interesting. Her backup dancers aren't stick-thin. And not just that, they aren't all what you might call "traditionally hot" for lack of a better term. You don't have to watch the video, just go below for pics...
The women in the video look so different from the usual backup dancers in videos, that something felt "off" about the video as soon as I started watching it. Part of it is that they're wearing wigs, but that just highlights that I think these women weren't chosen for their looks. Because while Minaj and some of the dancers (for example perhaps the one on the far right in the pic below) looks very pretty in the wig, some of the other women verge on the transsexual. And the comments on youtube reflect that ("Nicki's dancers are all men!")
Honestly, I thought at least one of them was a man myself, because that seemed like the sort of interesting thing Nicki Minaj would do! But as the internets made no note of it, I knew that couldn't be the case. The first time a high profile star hires a cross-dressed man to dance in their backup line, they're going to publicize that.
But no, these are Minaj's usual dancers--you can recognize them from other stage shows on youtube.
They're of course thin, but you can easily pick out Minaj's torso in this line-up.
I'm not the best observer of this, but a lot of these women might be darker than the average African-American backup video dancer. In any case there's a variety of skin tones, which I seriously doubt happened by accident.
They're also in Doc Martens, which makes this traditional "sexy dance pose" come off completely different than it usually would even with their short shorts and their push up bras.
I tried to find a random dance video to compare this with, out of what's popular right now. It was hard because Billboard's top spots are dominated by women right now, but here's Jason Derulo's recent "Don't Wanna Go Home".
Gorgeous skinny light skinned woman.
Gorgeous skinny lighter skinned woman.
Gorgeous skinny white women.
(But don't get me wrong, the women are great dancers.)
The only "traditional" sex objects in the video are herself, and her male models.
All of this is made that much more interesting by the fact that Minaj calls herself and her fans and I assume her dancers: Barbies--a nickname she didn't pick, but that she eventually adopted. The only way in which Minaj looks like a Barbie is in her tiny waist and her boobs--the backup dancers even less so.
There's some serious Barbie subversion going on here... and I like it.
Side note: Though Nicki wears some wicked high heels in her appearances, I've noticed that in these concerts--which I assume are longer--she and her dancers wear kitten heels or flats.
For example for one song she's in these:
While her dancers are in these:
But usually they're in flat boots.
Here's some more pictures of her dancers from various live performances. (Some are grainy cause they're screen shots I took from videos.)
I'm going to have to spoil my flower garden with two actual posts this week.
I was writing up a post for Friday about another video, when I came across David Guetta's latest hit "Where Them Girls At?". I started writing it up as a footnote in the other post, then decided, wotthehell, it deserves its own entry.
David Guetta is a French DJ and house music producer. I want to make fun of him and be all "doesn't he look like a Eurotrash asshole?" but what do I know about how much input he had into this stupid video? No point poking fun at him. One doesn't wish to be immature.
So onto the video itself, which has as its only redeeming value the always watchable Nicki Minaj. Here it is, if you want to sample it first:
This idea is he's blowing bubbles out of his speakers, and when the bubbles hit people it makes them dance but...
* What really happens is the bubbles hit mostly hot women and makes them flail around like possessed puppets while men watch. It's especially disturbing at the beginning when you don't know why it's happening. I was like: Why are these women flailing around? And why do the men look so pleased about it?
*Eventually you find out what's happening, but it still only seemed to happen to women, so it was still creepy. And then it happened to men, and a poster. But it never stopped being creepy. Creep. ee. It wouldn't have been creepy if they touched the bubbles and started DANCING. Getting FUNKY. GETTING DOWN. As opposed to flailing around like they were in pain. It's never disturbing to see someone suddenly dancing! Then it's like a musical!
* Everyone in this city is gorgeous, young, and pretty much light skinned. Aside from the skin part, I understand a club looking like that, or a party, or a street scene maybe, or an office... but a whole city? It reminded me of the advice I quoted from How Not to Write a Novel, that peopling your book this way gives the reader the feeling that some sort of ethnic cleansing has taken place. Soylent green anyone?
* This concept of a city being invaded by dancing bubbles would have worked so much better if the city hadn't been one big hot-people's-club, but had a street-scene video à la Chris Brown's "Yeah 3X."* Some kids, some oldies even, and an excuse to hire some hot dance crews! And you still could have kept the scene of hot girls coming from all over town to your party. It just wouldn't have felt like you were serving old people as the main meal.
Videos like Kanye's "Monster" don't disturb me, cause it's an attempt at art, and therefore some thought has been put into it, whether one agrees with the end effect or not. This crap disturbs me, cause it's a slapdash, thoughtfless, shitty, mindless, shallow attempt at entertainment that at its worst is harmful because of what it calmly contributes to the mass of images and ideas that some women and men, just looking for a fun song and a hot video to go with it, unthinkingly take in.
Ten vomits out of ten.
_____
* The Brown video. (Oh CB... please stop throwing chairs and being homophobe so I can believe you won't hit girls anymore. You're so talented. Hapoo.)
